Final Film

 The Final Film is here!!

    The final project is finally done. After all the research, planning, and production.

    I present to you, our finished film! 

Production- Behind Scenes

Behind the Scenes Video

        Hey guys, we've finally finished our filming Arisa was holding up the camera, getting all the shots, while I was holding the boom stick for the mics. Me and my sister put our phones in the background to capture this memory and also to see the progress on our filming day to get our final outcome.

    There were good moments like getting lines right and bad moments too, like when Arisa leaned to back, her hair caught on fire with the candle and I had to swat her with our boom stick, messing up lines and others. So, lets dive into the behind the scenes of this film and see some insight on the film. Hope you enjoy it!

Production- New Title & Font

  Heyy.. so I have new news. Basically we had to change our font because premier pro had a different font instead of the Weiss font we wanted. It does though look more scarier and better to be honest. Searching for the Weiss made us find the font, Lehmann.

    We liked this font. It gives a sharp look that we wanted from the other font, but it has a bit more of a scarier look. The letter edges are slightly sharper. We used this font for the credits too. We did change the color though because we wanted to make it look more like a slasher movie, as if it was blood. Changing the size of each of the letter gave it more of a deranged look to it, so we messed with it to give us the final product.

Ending Editing

    When the title comes up at the end of the clips, Arisa wanted it to zoom in all the way till the screen turn black, however it was truly hard trying to figure how to edit it like that. The speed would keep changing to fast or to slow. It just wasn’t right. We are both new to premier pro, so we didn’t know exactly how to do it. 

    That's when I came in clutch and zoom it the full title instead. It still gives the zoom affect without messing with the speed. So instead of zooming all the way it would just zoom till the title and then change to the clip of the black screen.

    This was the last hiccup of our film. Now I can’t wait to show how it ended it up in the film.

Production- Audio

 Fixing the Audio

    Hello! Whiles editing the film, we need to edit in sound for the scary music and make sure the actors voice were to loud.

    When editing we edited down their talking to make sure everything was in one frequency.

Here we are setting the audio to the same amount. The side bar shows audio setting as well. Not only did we have to tweak the audio we had to make the thud sound louder than the original audio, so it make it feel more like a jump scare sound. 

    In this picture below, background noise of someone dropping something found its way to the mic so turning down the volume on the clip helped so it couldn't be heard and also help use the clip.

 In this picture, muting the sound of Ana rustling with the blanket when getting up was used. 

    That dip that's shown on the audio clip under then clip of video, you can see a dip which the volume of the audio is going down. Understanding the way audio works helped us and mainly Arisa how to edit parts of audio we don’t need or removed.

Planning- Newspaper

 Creating the Newspaper

    Hey guys, so for our film, I wanted to add a magazine to add to the plot line. I wanted it to be a magazine, but I later found out that it had to be a newspaper instead because magazine has more pieces of other topics and I only wanted it to be a piece on the girl only.

    The plot was that there’s been in a killer on the loose and has been killing people in their houses. I wanted to give back up context so the audience can see that they are aware of a killer out there and this action of killing and that there's a killer after someone isn’t uncommon.

    This was the format of the magazine in the begging.

 

    I then made an explanation piece of the killer's victims and in particular one, Sophie Viglo.  

    I did though add other news article so it like it looks like it fresh from the mail and they placed it on the table.

    We both liked the outcome of the newspaper, "magazines," added to the plot. This will be a little key element to the plot and help lead up to the ending, the kill.

Production- Lighting

 Lighting

    Hey everyone, right now we are editing and we came across with our first problem…our lighting. 

    We were looking back at the footage and saw that our lighting was just too dark and wasn’t capturing all facial features we wanted. We didn’t considered how hard it would be filming at night, especially with the lights avaliable to use were lamps, candle and phones to use. Even though it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, it was a choice we made to get that dark, gloomy, vibe to the scence.

After changing the lighting settings on premier pro, we found a filter that makes the lighting bright and also making it look natural still.

Before

After

Though the lighting still seems off, at least it got brighter. We tried our best to get it brighter to make it look less spotty, but unfortunately, we couldn't, but hey, we did our best.

Planning- Story board

Story board

    Hey there! We are finally one step closer to the filming process and last step of planning. Braining storming ideas of our film and camera shot all into written and drawn on paper…. our storyboard. This is the film all on paper!

    Yes, I can see how our drawing skills are not up to part, but hey... the vision is there. Collaborating with Arisa and testing out the shots in class made us decide the best shot for each scene which I know would come out great in the film. Hopefully we execute it in the film!

Planning-Costume & Props

 Costume

    Hey guys, welcome back to my planning progress and in this blog, I will be discussing the concepts me and my partner want the character to wear in the film. First will be the victims/main characters.

Emma and Amberlin

    For these characters, we want a more comfortable look, since they are seen hanging out at a house. comfortable clothes such as sweatpants and a T-shirt give the appearance that they are relaxing at home.

    These outfits give the vibe and look of comfy and camera ready. We don't want to put them in pajamas and with no accessory because it would look too bland and we want a bit of lively look to them. Costume that matches this type of aesthetic help make the film feel more realism to the setting, which is a movie night.

     We went shopping at a store to look for a look for the character Amberline because she needed a top for her comfy look.

    We first picked out this hoodie but didn’t like it because it wouldn’t show the blood stain and is too dark for the film.

    This hoodie we thought was too baggy and too bright of a color. Also, the name Susan, we didn’t like it on the hoodie.

    This shirt was the one we spin backed on because we saw it but then thought a hoodie would suit the relaxing mood better, but we couldn’t find a hoodie we like. This shirt was cute, good fit for the actor, and bright and thin material to show the blood.

Killer's costume

    We want the killer to look dark and mysterious, so for the costume we were thinking anything for clothing to be black. For the killer, we have a very vague concept. The weapon we want it to be a fake knife. Since the killer kills with a typical weapon, the costume would have to be simple, such as the scream killers. Having a mask for the killer is the first step. Something unusual and ideal to our film plot as well, a timer to kills.

    We looked everywhere and asked anyone that if they had, "scary masks", and no one had any. We only found one sort of, "scary masks", which was a blank face mask at a store.

    we then wanted to make it looks scuff as if it wasn't the first kill. we painted scuff marks with black dash marks of paint. Rubbed it in the dirt and smashed it a couple times to make indents.

    We painted black around the eyes and made it go down around nose, almost like tears.

    We also had fake blood, so we flicked a couple of blood onto the mask with a paint brush to give it the                     effect of blood splatter.

This is the final outcome of the mask.

    This was the best we could've done since we were on a time crunch, so don't judge.

    The costume that the killer, aka me was going to be wearing was black leggings and a baggy black hoodie to make it scary in the dark and almost like a typical killer's costume.

    Right when the actors were on their way, I found a blank black costume in a closet, like a long dress shirt. I tried it on and it fit perfectly, with a bit of length to it to hide my shoes. It also came with one singular glove, so improvised and didn’t show my side that didn’t have one. This costume was perfect because it was the look we wanted.

Props

    For the weapon choice, we sadly couldn’t find a fake knife, so we improvised. We found a household kitchen appliance that came close to a fake knife.

    A knife sharpener! Pretty close to a knife if you tell me. This was the only available look alike we could find to a knife. 

    We want our character to look like they’ve been watching a movie, so I was thinking, "what about a snack for the movie?" That’s when I though popcorn! No, I wasn't hungry, I think it goes well with the scene, and it gives the film more of a realistic look as if they are genially watching a movie. We all did stop at boba before filming, so they were used as well, but clearly drunken all the way.

    Our costume ideas were on part with how we wanted the character to look. That’s all for the props & costumes!

Planning- Equipment

 

Equipment Time

    Equipment is something me and my partner don't have any knowledge on, so were going blind into getting the equipment needed for the film. The main things we need is a camera and a mic. Other equipment we thought about was a boom stick to, instead of have the mic showing on our actor's clothes. It's the only thing we could come up with that helps with that problem we didn't want.

Camera

    Instead of an iPhone, we wanted it to feel authentic and look good as if it wasn't film from a small device. We initially got this camera from our teacher because our teacher gave us this to borrow.

 

Canon EOS Rebel T7-DSLR camera

Mics

    For the audio, we wanted to get mics to make the audio clear. We went to BestBuy and ask for the best and we got...DJI mics.

 Camera#2

    Unfortunately, we ran into a problem with the mics having wrong cable, and the camera had a different input type than what the mics cable provided. We needed an adapter and we didn't buy it because our teacher gave us another camera that has a 1/4-inch audio cable that we needed, so no adapter needed.

 Canon EOS Rebel T8i camera

Boom stick

We made this out of wooden sticks and tape. Not the smartest, but it was the best we could do in a short time, the day we were filming. We got the sticks and then tape both sticks together to make it longer. We then taped up the mic to one of the ends too.

This is the outcome

Planning- Casting sheet

 

Casting Sheet

    Welcome back, I want to talk about my actors for my film. When planning who would be our actors, only two people came to mind that are our friends that are theater kids, so they have experience acting. Our victim actors are Nayisa Cabrera and Ana Pichardo.

    The killer on the other hand is me, Isabella Camelo, because we couldn't find anyone tall or available to play the role.

Planning-Title & Font

 Title

    Hello there, after figuring out what our film will be about its now time to come up with a title. We know the killer's victim with a timer, so we were thinking of the words "ticking" or "time". We just started making up title names that involved phrases of clocks and killing. Then we got our finish title

“Times out”, it included what we had in mind, something along the phrases time and it makes sense for what our plot was.

    Our font on the other hand we had some options to pick out that would’ve looked good and scary. We discussed some of the font we discussed before in our research process, such as Grave Digger, Weiss, Trajan, ITC Sefif Gothic. We narrowed it down to 3 that gave more of a clock-look.

    At the end we both agreed with the Weiss font. It gave the sharp, horror look, and clock-look we wanted. We tried them out and together it looked great and it came out better than we thought!

TIMES OUT

                                           

Planning- Script

Script

    Welcome back! We have drought out our script. we thought about how the script would be a week before we scheduled our shooting day. We in class, thought of what route the scary film would be.We first through of sketchy, scary places, but we have no access to certain areas, so instead we chose our houses. This is when we made our script around the concept of scary movie houses. We had in mind a little about the killer and our actors as victims. We first thought of like a layback, record player starting the scene, but then we leaned toward a modern script. Also wanted it to be based at nighttime.

    The first scene we wanted was an establishing shot of my partners house. We didn’t know what angle or not, so we took a shot at night to get an insight on how it would look like.

     A POV shot of one of the friends scaring another, but then we scraped that because we couldn’t figure out an original line to use so we came up with another idea.

    The establishing shot would still be used, but the next shot would be the two girls sitting on the coach watching tv. After that thought we realized the plot seems to dry and there isn’t anything coming together, it’s just scene being built. That when we had the idea of a newspaper going over a victim that also died in a house due to some killer. So the plot is that the killer is tied into a kill that would happen in the house.

    Instead of watching Tv that was blank we wanted them to watch something. Something interesting instead, like of  just a shot of them sitting, then the tv freezes and goes black. We did struggle on what the Tv would say because we didn’t want to plagiarize other movies.What can up was that it would say “I know what you did.” Then we thought, “what about bullying clips or bad messages of the victims,” but it didn’t flow.

    Then we thought what about if we think like the killer. So, we went into creative mode, making up ideas of why the killer would kill and that’s when we realize the killing is for fun, like a game.

    Now that we drought down the key plot scene we developed a script around it, which was quite easy.

    Heres our finished script!

 

Planning- Setting

 

 Setting

    Hey everyone, we need to secure our locations before we can begin filming.

      In the begging, when we were thinking about the typical slasher/horror settings, they are outside in the dark, like the woods, or an isolated town, but sadly we don’t have any of those around here in Florida. Then we thought about just outdoors, like a parking lot, but our plot we barely had developed didn’t really fit with that setting.

    The last idea we had thought about was using one of our houses. After the movie SCREAM that I analyzed before, this suited the slasher horror settings used often and our houses is easy access that would be easy for us to have free space for any creative idea.

Planning- Production Timeline

 Production Timeline

    Before I go over my planning ideas, I want to organize my thoughts about my planning days, leading to production. We decided the best way to do this was by creating a chart of this month to show the process to production. Filming is what we are all waiting for, but staying organized is important to make sure our editing and filming goes smoothly and have enough time to as well.

    In this month we have a lot to accomplished, pretty overwhelming, but nothing we can’t do! We will make sure the script is already and the storyboard align with it. Then it’s getting equipment time. Making sure all equipment are good to film, including mics lighting material, and camera of course. Re-enacting our storyboard to make sure everything flows and look good. Gathering material as well for the costumes and props we may use for the film such as popcorn, killers prop, and blood. That's what we are thinking so far for props.

    Filming has a whole week. This is because we don’t know how long it would take to film and if anything goes wrong with our actors not being able to do film the way we planned.

  Having this visual of our game plan for the production is very needed to help us organize and not procrastinate. Hopefully we do stick to this so our film can turn out great! 

Reaserach

Slasher Films Key Elements 

Welcome back guys, I did already go over on a bit of major companies that produce slasher horror in the target audience post, but to understand what elements they use to produce their film and how it can affect the plot of the movie is always good to know. I want to dive deeper into some elements used to get a good grasped on what specific help make a difference in their film.

Twisted Pictures

This company focuses on horror and thriller. This company is famous for the production of saw and making into a franchise, but let’s see what they used to produce the movie into such a good slasher film. Give context this movie is based of games characters are put into to survive, if not they die in the trap put in which is the games.

High concept killer-They start with a strong simple disturbing concept. A killer that uses a jigsaw, victims trapped in deadly games, a ticking clock. This is for the “kill scene”, it makes memorable and shocking towards the kills. This also builds suspense. Having a puppet control the game adds diatribes, childlike contrast to the violence that happens in the film.  There is a mastermind over the entire game the puppet basically giving instruction.

The fast editing and harsh sound design also place a critical part in this film. Rapid, chaotic cuts during violent scenes. Metallic sound effect and sudden music shifts. This unrestrained Shock and disorientation.

The setting of the scene where people are trapped in is dark creepy and unappealing to the eye.  This creates a tense and frightening atmosphere, making the audience feel uncomfortable and on edge. The gloomy environment adds to the sense of danger and helplessness, which build suspense. 

                                      

The key elements used were the disturbance in the film used by the concept on how they die and the killer weapons choice. The editing and sound make important moment by when the character realizes something or anticipation of the kill. Lastly, the atmosphere the character is put in, which is in creepy places in situation their in. this makes the setting of the film dark and scary for both viewers and characters.

         

                                       The mastermind of the trap and the puppet                                     Places characters were put in

After analyzing what this movie used to make the movie scarier, I would want to apply some of these to

 my film. Intently analyzing this movie helped me see different techniques used crucially to make to film and that helps me a lot understand about film. Films have certain Yemenis used differently by the producer to make the film the way they want to.

Killer- I want to evolve something out of the ordinary serial killer, where they just kill. I want to incorporate something engaging towards the victims like the movie. A game.

The setting- To make the setting scary they used way more creep, gorgy places, I will make my place feel uneasy and scary by making it pitch black.

Editing- I would want to do more shot of them close up to capture their expression. The harsh editing in the movie, I doubt I would do it, but it's a possibility and I would keep it in mind.

learning what techniques this movie uses helps me understand and see if I would use them in my film. This gives more specific skills I can used as well and maybe will see in the film!

Sources

Jigsaw - Plugged In

“Jigsaw”: An Unconventional Mystery Film - The Vision

Jigsaw (2017 film) - Wikipedia

Jigsaw Pedagogy: The Teaching Strategies of the Saw Franchise - Horror Movie - Horror Homeroom

Media and Music: Storytelling and Sound Design in “Saw” — afterglow

Project Proposal

                             

Project Proposal

Hello, I want to official welcome you to my group member, Arisa Alvarez. Me and my member have decided to work together and collaborate our brilliant ideas for our slasher horror film.

Background information

I am a sophomore and she's a junior and we finalized our decision on slasher horror. We first wanted to do our film on romance, but we redirected our choice to horror because its  a genre we both like and think we would enjoy filming. choosing our sub genres was a bit harder because we couldn’t decide till I stated out about slasher and she though it was good. 

Potential issues

The final girl character deals with the death of her best friend. Her finding her dead makes her deal with the trauma that night when the killer attacked them at her house. As the final plot faces the killer at the end of the film plot, she tries to get revenge for her friends and the other victims by trying to kill the killer. This is going against the typical stereotypes of females, showing that they can be powerful and strong.

Potential target audience

The target distinct is more toward a girl audience because we planned for our film to base on two girls only. Age range would be teenagers to young adult who enjoy thriller and suspense. 

 Software we're using

We will be using is Premiere Pro. Start of class, we got experience with the software, and I had personal experience before. Creating our own product in class did help us feel more comfortable editing. 

 We have planned out so far, the script and a brief idea of the scene we will do. After the script, we will come up with the title with the font and color. Then we’ll decide on costume, actors, and props. Adding on, we will make a casting sheet for our actors, storyboard to draw out the film for every camera shot and camera movement.